The Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum is trying hard to convince its young visitors that the way to an exciting career is to get their hands dirty, writes LAURA SLATTERY
INSIDE THE SLOPED walls of London’s cocoon-shaped Darwin Centre, visitors can peer through glass windows into the pristine labs where scientists extract DNA from the legs of mosquitoes – not just for fun, obviously, but in a bid to contain outbreaks of malaria.
The eight-storey Cocoon, housed within the sprawling Natural History Museum, opened to the public a few weeks ago and aims to show science as it happens and as it matters now.
As with the new Darwin biopic, Creation, the centre doesn't dwell on how the world's most famous biologist actually discovered natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is yesterday's news. The centre is instead dedicated to the current preoccupations of scientists, namely the shrinking biodiversity that has come with climate change and the constant battle to halt the spread of killer diseases.
If that sounds like heavy going, then it truly isn’t. The white coats and microscopes may be present, and there may be 20 million insect and plant specimens lurking, but there is barely a glass cabinet in the actual exhibition. Instead, the curators of the Cocoon have gone out of their way to convince school-aged visitors that a career in science could be one big adventure.
At the age of 22, Charles Darwin began the trip of a lifetime. His five-year round-the-world voyage on the HMS Beagle, which took in South America, Australia and New Zealand, started him wondering why there was such infinite variety in the species he found. Why, for example, was it necessary for there to be so many distinct types of iguana?
Darwin, according to biologist Richard Dawkins, “liked to get his hands dirty”, so it seems appropriate that the Darwin Centre plays host to a string of touch-screen video displays and interactive games (match the parasite to the bat, and so on) designed to show how today’s generation of scientists get mucky.
One of the video travelogues describes how a team of muscular-looking scientists set about collecting rare and previously unclassified species of moth in Taiwan, using light traps. A tropical typhoon confines them to their hotel, and when it ends they find the traps have been wrecked by water.
Not all is lost though. The Taiwanese forests still yield some new species of moth (something a little more exciting than the average bedroom variety). The message is clear: being a moth expert is not a nine-to-five office job. If you want to have great anecdotes about the time you got paid to go to Taiwan and got stuck in the middle of a freak weather event, become a biologist.
One of the most exciting projects being worked on by scientists at the Natural History Museum is the mosquito barcoding initiative, which is explained to visitors on a video narrated by insect expert Yvonne Linton. This global collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC aims to fight malaria by identifying the species of mosquito that carry the disease. Picking out the “bad mozzies” from the good ones is not easy, as there are more than 3,500 different species of mosquito and they all look kind of similar.
In the project, a DNA “signature” or barcode is assigned to each species, Linton explains. Some of this work has already been done at sea, on board a floating research institute called the Scholar Ship, on which Linton travelled around the world, identifying some of the problematic species in the on-board DNA labs.
While the museum’s curators gingerly re-pin specimens that were collected as far back as 1789 (in a bid to preserve them), molecular biologists at the centre are working with the crucial piece of the jigsaw that was discovered after Darwin’s death: DNA. Darwin knew that species varied, and he knew why, but he didn’t know how.
The great scientist’s blood runs through the museum – literally. According to one of the factoids imparted by the centre’s virtual tour guides, Darwin kept some of the flies he swatted after they bit him, meaning his own DNA can probably be found in some of the older insect samples.
Darwin's masterpiece, On The Origin of Species, contained what Dawkins describes as "perhaps the most brilliant idea to ever occur to a human mind". The minds behind the new centre hope to convince younger visitors that if they spend their lives getting dirty with algae and insect larvae, they could be the ones who discover the next brilliant idea that changes the world.
The Darwin Centre is at the Natural History Museum, Exhibition Road, Kensington, London. Tickets are free but should be booked in advance at nhm.ac.uk. To mark the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, the museum is also hosting an exhibition of new art inspired by Darwin's book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man in Animals– it runs until Nov 29